The human brain is a very complex organ, structurally and functionally. Cognition is a term that psychologists use to describe a wide array of different brain processes and activities that include perception, thinking, reasoning, memory, attention and creating new information or ideas. This is however a limited view of cognition as now it became clear that cognition is the product of interplay between all of these components and more.

00:01
Okay, let’s talk
about cognition,more specifically how we process the
information once it actually enters our mind.
00:08
So we’re going to go
through a couple of modelsand take a look at
what that looks like.
00:12
So, we’re going to look at some
information processing modelsand this is what happens when
a stimulus enters the brain.
00:18
So, we know when we engage with
the environment and our world,information is coming in through
the somatosensory process.
00:24
That’s covered in another module, but
the point is information is coming in.
00:28
Once it comes in, we need to
go through a couple of steps.
00:31
So, the first step
is the attention.
00:34
We have to draw attention to the
fact that something is coming in.
00:37
And then we have the perception
of what is going on.
00:39
And then ultimately, we’re going
to have storage into memory.
00:42
So, going through
each of those steps,there’s a lot that needs
to be done in order tounderstand what it is that
we’ve just engaged with.
00:50
So our minds can be compared
to computers and that theychange, store, use and
retrieve information, right?So we’ve used that analogy before
because it makes a lot of sense.
00:59
So, the Alan Baddeley model
attempted to better defineshort-term memory, renaming
it to working memory.
01:04
And so, that’s not to say
that it replaces short-termmemory, but we have something
called working memory.
01:10
So, in the memory section that
we’ve done prior to this,we have talked about the
fact that working memoryis something that gets input from both
short-term memory and long-term memory,and is used in terms of
accomplishing or achieving a task.
01:25
So, included in working memory we have
the phonological loop, which is where werepeat verbal information -- phone numbers,
a list, an address, an email address.
01:35
We have visuospatial
sketchpad, where we usemental images and redraw
what we though we saw.
01:40
We have episodic buffer, where the working
memory interacts with the long-term memoryand it’s basically drawing from episodic
experiences that we’ve had previously.
01:52
Then we have the central executive,
which is basically the conductorand it oversees the process,
mediates attention,and decides where is that we’re
going to focus our attention.
02:01
So this was Alan Baddeley’s
Working Memory Model.
02:07
So we have all the different components
that we basically talked about.
02:11
So there’s language.
02:11
So you can see here on the
bottom, we have language,visual semantics, and
short-term episodic memory,and that feeds into or is
run by things like thephonological loop, the
visuospatial sketchpad,episodic buffer, and all these
things feed into our centralexecutive, which manages what it
is that we’re actually doing.
02:29
The end result of all of
this stuff is that we’redrawing on information that
we have in our memory,we use some of the tools
that we have at our disposalin a bin called working memory
to answer or achieve a taskrun by the central executive.

About the Lecture

The lecture Information-Processing Model – Cognition (PSY) by Tarry Ahuja, MD is from the course Making Sense of the Environment.

Included Quiz Questions

Jane is trying to remember all the items on her grocery list. What is one method of remembering the items?

Phonological Loop

Episodic buffer

Cognitive executive

Implicit memory

Personal memory

Author of lecture Information-Processing Model – Cognition (PSY)

Tarry Ahuja, MD

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